Tough Talk On Syria Could Shred America's Credibility

Syria: The president says Syria's use of chemical weapons against its people crosses a "red line." Whether or not intervening militarily is wise, the U.S. has boxed itself into doing so or losing world standing.

Maybe President Obama's esteem for the United Nations is so great, he wants the U.S. to take up its habit of issuing ineffective threats to the world's bad actors.

In the Oval Office alongside Jordan's King Abdullah on Friday, Obama talked up regime change in Syria.

"President Assad has lost legitimacy," he said, and "we need to find a political transition that allows a multi-sect, democratic transition to take place."

The apparent use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians "is going to be a game changer," Obama promised, adding that "not just in the United States but around the world ... we cannot stand by and permit the systematic use of weapons like chemical weapons on civilian populations."

Obama noted "the potential for chemical weapons to get into the hands of terrorists" and said the Syrian chemical weapons use "crosses a line that will change my calculus and how the United States approaches these issues."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told ABC News' Jonathan Karl later on Friday that President Obama "retains all options to respond to" Syria, and that includes military strikes on the country.

The first obvious observation is that Obama's rhetoric sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush's rationale for liberating Iraq, which Obama in 2002 called "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics."

Like Syria's Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his people too, but according to Obama in 2002, "Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors," therefore "in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history."

As ABC News' Karl pointed out Friday, "White House officials have made it clear repeatedly that the president is not going to rush into another war in the Middle East over weapons of mass destruction."

In other words, Obama speaks big but carries no stick.

Dethroning the blood-thirsty Iranian ally Assad may not be wise. As Andrew McCarthy, prosecutor of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing terrorists, recently wrote in National Review, "if ousting Assad is your priority, you are stuck with Islamists and jihadists."

And America's former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton warned over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal against intervening, even as he pointed out that Obama's "latest act of foreign-policy fecklessness provides further proof to Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, whether states or terrorists, that he is not a force to be reckoned with."

Ousting or tolerating Assad was already a devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea proposition.

Thanks to Obama boxing the U.S. in with his big talk, not acting against him will now shred U.S. credibility.

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